Recent developments on the stock market kind of killed the market idealism for me. I don't know what's a better alternative, but from where I'm standing the financial system is rewarding wasteful and immoral behaviour and it's degenerating really fast.
Yes! Exactly!
I have a friend who's doing well from crypto. He bought an NFT for $800 and it's not worth $8,000. Where is the (social) value in that? Except for the social experimentation this is all providing, it's not solving a problem AT ALL!
This is how I feel in a nutshell: if I make $1m today, I want it to be because I solved a hard problem for a lot of people, not because of some meaningless, intangible wishy thinking currency.
For this reason alone luxury collectable watches are a smart investment for diversification purposes for the ultra wealthy.
Frankly, cryptocurrency being invented and created was a huge mistake for society at large. I hope the comeuppance isn't super destructive outside of cryptocurrency circles.
This is one of my concerns too. I sock away a healthy % of my income in to traditional investments, and I aspire to one day own a home I can raise a family in.
The current asset bubble, which I personally believe is the wedge driving cryptocurrency apart from reality, is really hurting those of us with these rather mundane aspirations.
Satoshi Nakamoto did nothing wrong: hard to imagine, but Bitcoin started out as a crummy C++ GUI Windows application hosted on SourceForge and adopted almost exclusively by batshit insane people. It had no value: you could CPU mine it on any ordinary Windows PC. Many people refused to do even that because of how worthless BTC was at the time.
Enter the Libertarian/profiteer cohort, and the rest is history. Really think a bunch of you need to redirect your anger at the ICO game. Try to imagine Vitalik Buterin hard selling a clear gray market IPO on Reddit in combination with a high pressure countdown timer, and lots of fancy lawyers and Swiss foundations. That — the fact so many bitcoins were raised so easily for so little — is what unleashed the hellfire shillnado that has become synonymous with cryptocurrency in the modern era.
Satoshi (whether it be he, she, or they) went into creating Bitcoin intended as a peer to peer cash that was easy to spend and outside of government control. Unfortunately, at least in the case of Bitcoin, it has turned into this slow, unwieldy "commodity" that is now rebranded as digital gold.
Thanks for your perspective, atweiden.
It was called that before bitcoin even existed. See BitGold, a late 90's precursor to bitcoin.
And nobody gives a fuck.
> I see no value being created in these "investments".
And stock market is any better? At the inception stock market was a tool to invest and prop up businesses for long term dividend gains. No its pure speculation tool that doesn't benefit anyone but the concentrated wealth, it is so removed from reality (but you already mentioned that).
At least I made money of crypto, before the blob of ultraweathly descends on it.
I can make enough money to live comfortably through work, admitedly I would be a lot safer if I had more, I prefer investing in realestate that I can potentially monetise by renting and I can leave to my children. It's probably not the most efficient but I don't want to spend time and effort on investing in to stockmarket, crypto or w/e - I chose SW development because I like to build things that solve problems and be creative - at this point crypto/stocks feel like the exact opposite (initially I gave it the benefit of a doubt but at this point I'm almost certain it's a bubble built on spreading bullshit)
No. Cryptocurrency valuation is 100% driven by narrative, categorically.
Your post in and of itself exemplifies the narrative pumping rhetoric which is at the core of all cryptocurrency valuation. There are absolutely no exceptions to this, and that is not an exaggeration in any way.
This is my thinking too. But I can't fully get rid of the FOMO. What if I could turn my thousands into millions? It would change my life forever.
why? It's doing the exact thing that it was intended to do - price the value of public companies.